This week in Usability & Productivity: part 17

Regular readers might have noticed that I’ve stopped the weekly Discover posts. I’ve decided to centralize that information here, and so I’d like to highlight several weeks’ worth of awesome new features and improvements for Discover:

39 thoughts on “This week in Usability & Productivity: part 17”

This is epic.
In a week, at very least 3 important bugs I encountered in the past were fixed + tons of improvements + all the discover stuff. For instance I stumbled upon this Baloo issue yesterday.
Thanks again to the whole team !
I’m pretty sure this initiative will be seen as historic in the future.

Please never let these massive lists stop coming, love it!
Hopefully in the future there will also be made improvements on getting involved. Mainly on things like translation. I’ve looked at all the guides, but it’s too advanced for people like me. 😦

I am really interested in the Discover progress: Linux really needs a good option in this regard! Thanks to everyone for their efforts.

For things like the Baloo fix, I have heard some complaints from Kubuntu 18.04 testers around baloo performance and wonder how the best way for them to get the fix is? Will this come to the Kubuntu PPA for 18.04 users or??

Yes, it will be available via the backports PPA. One thing to keep in mind is that new installs of 18.04 actually disabled the full-text indexer because of issues like these, you you’ll need to turn it on again (System Settings > Search > File Search > check “Also index file content”).

Since upgrading form Kubuntu 17.01 to 18.04, KWallet no longer opens immediately its vault after logging in. This leads to the fact, that it takes minutes for the wifi to connect. Once it connected it disconnects again, just to connect again.
Upgrading to kubuntu staging ppa did not help either. I now completely removed it.. 😦

I think you should bring a lot of attention to KWallet in the future. 🙂

Wow! I’ve been following your posts since a couple of weeks, now I must say a big thank to you and all the people involved in this improvements! These really make me wanna install KDE Neon or a rolling distro to try them 😀 when I have money in the future I’ll consider donating to some KDE projects… in the meanwhile: thank you! keep the great job.

I know it is a K-name thing, but seeing the K3B screen saying “… and Blu-ray Kreator” just looks like a typo more than anything. To me, this takes away from the fantastic polishing going on in other parts of the software.

Discover literally killed my KDE Neon last week when it removed core KDE apps and modules while I was trying to remove VLC. I’d still use it when I get around to installing Neon again, because I like the idea of a simple software center. I can see that it’s gotten much better compared to a year ago.

This is not Discover’s fault, but rather a known KDE Neon packaging bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379721. Discover even warns you by displaying a list of any packages that need to be removed as part of the operation, which should have sent up some red flags (“Why does VLC want to remove Plasma?”). It’s possible that you clicked through it without reading. If not, and if you’re using a reasonably up-to-date version of Discover, then there’s a bug, and I would encourage you to file one at bugs.kde.org.

I’m a fan of his work and Plasma. Could I make a suggestion? Would it be possible to include a native method to turn off the extractable devices in addition to the existing one that only dismantles it?

Hey, Nate. On my Discover (on 5.12.5) I must sometimes manually choose the ‘check for updates’ or run ‘pkcon refresh’ for Discover to recognise any updates (the ‘checking for updates’ during Discover startup doesn’t find any). I want to file a bug – is there a good way to ‘debug’ this type of problem so I can help you devs?

Hey Nate, I really exited to read your frequent blog posts. This polishing is really important and makes a good impression. I guess your list is already long. Are the activities already on that list? They once appeared very promising. Unfortunately they never came into a useful state. Are there any plans on improving them?

IMHO what we need to do is first sort out and hopefully collapse the distinction between activities and virtual desktops. Having these two similar-but-not-identical means of doing many of the same things is a source of confusion and duplication of effort.

Another distinction should/could be context based activities. e.g. change the default printer depending on the Wifi/Network connection. Enabling activities by time, by network, by Bluetooth connection. What I am also missing is showing different bookmarks, different mailaccounts/folders, different folders in Dolphin-sidebar depending on the activity

I came here at the bottom to make a suggestion about the “Open/Save dialog” but before sending the message I checked the thing I’d like to see the behavior changed and… it was already changed. What? That updated I did yesterday did the trick and I didn’t notice, wow, sasuga KDE devs!
Thanks for the amazing work!